re: Prehistory, all wrong

[Geoff argues that the findings from Göbekli Tepe in Kurdistan confirm the classicist E. R. Dodds' proposal that Western "rationality" was transmitted via portals in Ionia and the eastern Mediterranean from its roots in the Archaic period (c.7,000 BP) among animistic, non-literate, nomadic, Eurasian steppe-dwellers. There is the further, daring, hypothesis that the 'mother civilization' - astronomically sophisticated, shamanic, transcontinental, without social hierarchy - may have been centered in Ohio. IB]

The news from Turkish Kurdistan is certainly very exciting. It's to be expected that Newsweek would cover these developments as "news" -- not only for the specific archaeology but also as challenging the paradigm of "civilization." Yet, on the latter score, it really isn't news. True, Old Worldists have clung to the antiquated notion that the story of civilization had some "beginning," coincidentally located just where the biblical account said it did. Americanists and their progeny, however, have been poking holes in the granarian concept of civilization for a very long time.

By "granarian" I mean the concept that grain agriculture provided the seed for everything else that we associate as "civilized." In a sense, this has been true by definition, since one dictionary definition of civilization confines the term to that complex of characteristics emergent from the great granary societies of the Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, Nile and Yangtze valleys.

That circular definition has always been uninteresting, just as if we define intelligence as related to human cognition, and then exclude porpoises as lacking smarts. (It was always nettlesome that the most "civilized" people to emerge from the Middle East were not agriculturists, but shepherds, i.e. nomads, with a weird shamanistic religion that spurned the granary gods -- namely, Jews.)

Native Americans were, of course, slow to comprehend why the most civilized men were also the most barbaric, and such questions intensified from the Railroad Age to the Atomic Age, as "civilization" brought annihilation to many indigenous lands. The paradox was explored most poignantly in the wake of the first H-Bomb explosion, in Roy Pearce's 1953 book, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind.

Questions were likewise posed by the founders of modern American nations, who were eager to utilize archaeological finds as yielding an indigenous underpinning for national identity, even if this process were based on the European precedent. When in Rome (Ohio), do as the Italians did.

Thus, both Indians and pioneers were quick to recognize the extensive earth and stone works of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, and of Mexico and Peru, as the ruins of ancient civilizations, and this was unperturbing for a while, as long as the Mound-builders and Mayans could be considered as wandering Jews, Hindus or Egyptian pharaohs, or, in the slightly modified version, as long as the Indian upper class was thought to consist of corn agriculturists, reproducing the Old World granarian route to writing, arithmetic, and RV parks.

Alas, kinks appeared in the armor of civilization. Ephraim George Squier, who had unique credentials for having studied Indian architecture in Ohio, New York, Nicaragua, and Peru, acquired an ancient Peruvian skull, now at the American Museum of Natural History, which has a square hole, made artificially while the individual was still alive. Forensic analysis has concluded the hole could only have been made by the surgical procedure known as trepanation, an advanced medical technique for relieving intracranial pressure.

A similar bit of evidence comes not from any urban area -- as ancient Peru might be conceived with some strain -- but from the distinctly non-urban area of Yakutia, in remote northeastern Siberia. It is not a human but a bison skull, found in a human burial mound, and this skull has a perfectly circular hole. That hole has been interpreted as evidence the animal was shot with a musket ball. There are two problems with that theory: 1. calcification shows the animal survived the event as the bone began to regrow; and 2. the skull dates from two centuries before the musket was invented.

The rational conclusion, barring time-travel and extraterrestrial visitation, is that trepanation was being practiced on a fairly widespread basis by shamans, as a combination of medicine and spiritual healing, in the known diffusion range of classical shamanism that extended from the Americas into Asia.The fact that the bison skull was buried with humans is further evidence that the bison may not have been hunted but rather used as a surgical specimen, perhaps for practice.

Another weird anomaly came from Mexico when, in the 1990s, it was discovered by a Vermont archaeologist and his students that very ancient stone sculptures of human figures along the Pacific coast contain concentrations of magnetite, always at the same two points in the figure -- below the navel and at the right temple. Not only does this imply awareness of magnetism, but also a refined idea about the way that magnetic force interacts with the human body.

Still, it was possible to dismiss such discoveries as weird anomalies. Until the last decade of the 20th century, the most magnificent works of the Ohio Valley, which include the largest prehistoric constructions in the world (one, in Portsmouth, Ohio, extended for ten continuous miles in the form of a rattlesnake effigy) were sloughed off as just another excrescence of corn-god worship. Corn agriculture yielded population density, leisure time for artistic _expression_, social hierarchy, slavish adherence to the planting calendar, yadda yadda, yadda. It was all so Mesopotamian, we were reassured.

Then in the 1990s it was found -- horror of horrors -- that the Ohio Indians of the Golden Age, from about 300 BC to 500 AD -- were not growing corn on any significant scale. Rather, their staples were nuts, roots, bird meat, and freshwater molluscs. They had no cities, no complex social hierarchies, no elaborate fields or gardens, and no written language -- yet they produced the largest and some of the most refined and beautiful artistry. How uncivilized!

Also in the 1980s and 90s, Ray Hively and Bob Horn made some astounding discoveries about ancient Ohio astronomy. Hively and Horn had previously debunked the alleged astronomical alignments of Stonehenge, which gave them great academic respectability, and made them unpopular at crystal-healing solstice and dowsing gatherings. They expected to debunk the alleged alignments of the Ohio earthworks, too. But it didn't work out that way.

One truism about archaeoastronomy is that any two points on the ground align with an infinite number of celestial points, because the heavens rotate in diurnal, annual, and longer cycles. It's therefore very hard to "prove" that a given set of alignments was both intentional and precise. At Chillicothe and Newark, Ohio, however, there are two large, irregular, earthen octagons. They are so large that each one can enclose three Roman Coliseums. And they are slightly different in their angles.

Hively and Horn have been able to demonstrate that the slight differences perfectly account for the difference in latitude, and that each octagon embedded alignments to all eight extreme rise and set points at the minimum and maximum times of the moon's 18.6-year cycle. Since an average adult can only witness two or three such cycles, this feat implies that observation, data-sharing, and planning were done over many generations, which in turn implies what we call science. The engineered differences between the two octagons shows that the builders understood, measured, and accounted for differences in latitude.

But that's not all. The lunar rise and set points encoded in those octagons were not the points observable on the ground. Rather, they were the theoretical rise and set points assuming a zero or sea-level horizon, far from what exists in southern Ohio. That is, the Indians built the octagons to point to horizon marks that they themselves could not observe, but which could only be observed from high in the air, or in the mind's-eye of an Einsteinian thought experiment. That, in turn, implies a type of theoretical astronomy far exceeding anything done by any literate culture in Babylonia, China, Egypt, or Mexico.

Now this starts to get disturbing. People who were non-literate, non-urban, non-agrarian were doing very civilized things like cranial surgery, magnetic manipulation, theoretical astronomy, and precise geodesy. Granted, these developments, as far as we know, were recent in comparison to the newly revealed culture in Kurdistan, but that may only be because we have no access to the older American record. One circularity of historians is to rely on written records to document the early stages of civilizations, only some of which developed written language. If the non-literate societies were in some ways more "advanced," how would we know? The erection of earthworks large enough to withstand millennia of erosion may have been a late development, or a matter of chance.

(The oldest known large earthwork complex in the Americas is at Poverty Point, Louisiana, and dates to 1650 BC, but no one can say there were not older large sites, made harder to find by the fact that the North Americans preferred earth to stone as a building material. In addition, many such structures may have been built over older ones, of which there is much suggestive evidence.)

The granarians have had another unacknowledged problem. The ingredients for civilization were there all along in the six predominant Old World river valleys spread between the Nile and the Yangtze. What took so long? Or, more astutely, why did all of these civilizations reach threshold nearly simultaneously, to the extent that each one can make some primacy claim? Diffusion is not a persuasive answer, because if the trigger events happened in one place, with consequent diffusion to the others, that pattern ought to be discernable. But it's not discernable. Rather, we see the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Indians, the Chinese, and quite a few other cultures between them, all climbing the same ladder together in simultaneity, with only tenuous connections between them. Indeed, the absence of a clear primogenitor and leader among the early civilizations is what led to those nasty nuisance speculations that the true "mother civilization" remained unknown, located on some lost continent named Atlantis or Mu.

As it happens, there's a solution to this problem, in relation to which the new results from Kurdistan are confirmatory rather than revolutionary. That solution was provided, in essence, by the classicist Eric Robertson Dodds in lectures presented at UC Berkeley, collected in his 1951 classic, The Greeks and the Irrational. There, Dodds argued that virtually everything we associate with the "rational" (i.e. civilized) in Greek philosophy, mathematics, and science, was inherited. And, with apologies to Martin Bernal, the key kernels were not inherited from Egypt, nor even from the Persians, the Phoenicians or the Jews. Rather, that element of "advancement" came from the supposedly savage cultures of the north and east, from the shamanic peoples of the Eurasian steppe, who even lack proper names. It's for that reason, according to Dodds, that the most important early Greek academies were at northeastern portals, like on the island of Lesbos. According to Dodds's persuasive arguments, the most important Greek figures in geometry, astronomy, and engineering -- the likes of Thales, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Leucippus, Socrates -- were themselves shamans, transmitting a system that came to Greece through those northern and eastern portals.

Since 1951, the study of shamanism has greatly advanced. We now understand, as we did not earlier, that the shamanic peoples of the Central and Western Asian steppes, the Siberians, and the North and South Americans were in touch through a vast network for many thousands of years, and that this network predated rather than post-dated the classic civilizations of what we call the Near and Far East. The Russian Americanist Yuri Bereznik has traced elaborate and improbable indigenous mythic themes (like dwarfs battling cranes) along trans-Pacific routes from Scandinavia to Brazil. And we know from content analysis that this knowledge flowed almost unidirectionally from America to Eurasia, perhaps because the Aleutian currents flow east to west. We also know that the shamanic system was Archaic, but not Paleolithic. It originated in North America sometime after the glaciers retreated, probably at the time when the great megafauna was disappearing, about nine to eleven thousand years ago. Around that same time, North American technology changed drastically, and most of the North American language families emerged, one (Na-Dene) with a branch that extends to central Siberia.

It's in this context that all those weird anomalies -- the trepaned skulls, the magnetic monuments, the lunar-aligned octagons -- make sense. The "Mother Civilization" wasn't located on a lost continent, unless we consider that continent to be North America. "Civilization" was, at its root, nomadic, animistic, non-literate, and without social hierarchy.

This explains why the classic Asiatic civilizations developed simultaneously. They were not in very good contact with one another, but each was in constant intercourse with that Mother Civilization, which continued to occupy the Eurasian heartland, reaching coastal Asia and the Mediterranean all at about the same time, leaving no written records of its growth. The common influence of steppe languages on Sino-Tibetan, proto-Semitic, and proto-Indo-European is further evidence of this diffusion. In the 1969 masterpiece Hamlet's Mill, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend traced the shared literary and mythological themes of Europe and Asia to some common influence that they placed in the mid-Archaic period, between 4000 and 6000 BC. That common influence was the transcontinental civilization of shamanism.

9500 BC seems a bit too early for the newly found temple in Kurdistan. Perhaps that dating will be revised, or perhaps the influx of new knowledge and new religion from North America did begin much earlier. But in any case, it's not the beginnings of civilization that are at issue. When people assembled in urban centers, subordinated to kings, locked away their foodstuffs in vaults, and replaced oral wisdom with written trash, it was the beginning of the end.